'The truth is a little more complicated – and a lot more clichéd – than that. So, here it is. I took up baking'
Louise O'Neill
I am weary of people asking me what I ‘learned’ during lockdown. Nothing, I want to reply sullenly. I am surviving it.
What more could we ask of ourselves during a global pandemic? But the truth is a little more complicated – and a lot more clichéd – than that. So, here it is. I took up baking. Clearly, as the national flour shortage during the first lockdown would suggest, I wasn’t the only one. I didn’t resort to sourdough starters, I’m not a total monster.
But there was a period during March of last year where I put on an apron and took out the kitchen scales every day. I made sea salt and chocolate chip cookies, Victoria Sponge, blueberry and lemon muffins, citrus spice scones, and pecan banana bread. (I almost rugby tackled other customers to the ground if I saw them so much as glance in the direction of the blackening bananas in the supermarket.)
But the one that stuck was a brown soda bread recipe I found on Colm O’ Gorman’s (The Irish Examiner’s newest columnist) Instagram page. It was easy; a wet mix of whole-wheat flour and hazelnuts, buttermilk and molasses, oozing off the wooden spoon and into the tin. Bashed into the oven, a heady, delicious smell filling the kitchen as it began to rise. Slathering a slice of it with Glenilen butter and my next-door neighbour’s homemade marmalade and just for one moment, I didn’t feel anxious or afraid anymore.
Thinking about it now, I can’t help but wonder if it’s because it reminded me of my grandmother. She made her own soda bread every week. It wasn’t the same as mine – she required no recipe, she had learned how to bake bread at her mother’s knee, and it was instinctive to her, pouring out the flour and milk with a free hand. She would throw the mixture on the counter, sprinkling more flour on top, kneading it with her strong, calloused hands until it was ready to slide into the oven.
In Clonakilty, we ate spaghetti Bolognese and shepherd’s pie and chicken curry in the evening, when my father came home from work, but in my grandparents’ house, dinner was had in the middle of the day. “The tea” was what we had at night, and it was slices of Granny’s soda bread with butter and a cheap, synthetic strawberry jam, served with a large pot of tea.
My sister and I didn’t drink tea at home, we had glasses of water or milk, 7up if it was special occasion, but in Granny’s, we drank cups and cups of the stuff, milky and overly-sweet. Everything tasted better there, for some reason.
My grandmother hated cooking and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me saying this, she was bad at it. The meat would be cremated, the carrots so long boiled, they quite literally melted in the mouth. But she was an excellent baker. Soda bread, drop scones, queen cakes. Her perfect apple sponge.
Years later, when I lived in New York, I went to a hipster brunch place in Greenpoint with a group of the achingly cool girls I worked with, and they gushed about this ‘rad’ dish I just ‘had to try’. My bark of laughter when I saw it was pavlova, the dessert my grandmother made every week for Sunday lunch. I rang her afterwards to tell her, and she was equally amused. It was nowhere near as good as yours, I said, and we both giggled.
When she died, one of my greatest regrets was that I never asked her to teach me how to bake properly.
It seemed impossible that I wouldn’t eat her soda bread again. I remembered her so clearly, standing in the kitchen with that worn-out apron, a smudge of flour on her face, her hands deep in the mixing bowl. Like so many women of her generation, her life had been characterised by hard work and sacrifice, never complaining about either, and suddenly, I thought that maybe the baking had been a form of meditation. While she kneaded her bread, she was searching for a few seconds of peace in the midst of the chaos.
Or maybe that’s just what I am doing, all these years later, in my own kitchen. Blocking out the fear from the world around me as best I can. 350g whole-wheat flour. Bicarbonate of soda. A pinch sea salt, a handful of hazelnuts. I check the recipe, muttering the names of the ingredients as I pour them into a large mixing bowl. I make that bread every week and each time, I want to say – look at me, Granny. Can you believe it?
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